Carroll Dunham
Works on Paper

Patrick De Brock is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on paper by Carroll Dunham. For more than three decades, Dunham's artistic practice has continually engaged the growing tensions that underlie the act of painting and its art historical legacy. Following multiple courses from his animated metamorphic shape-making, lifted from the knotted surfaces of wood paneling, to the psychic inscriptions of the libidinal, Dunham moves skilfully over the ever closing gap between abstraction and representation.

In two separate series, one consisting of large mixed media on paper, the other small pencil drawings, Dunham revisits the pastoral landscape and the female bathers that he first established in 2009. Dunham's figures are both in and of their surroundings, composed of recurring motifs that are at once subject matter and formal devices. In these works, Dunham pushes color, form and line to build compositional pressures that complicate the primacy of the figure-ground relationship, employing unusual cropping and perspectival strategies that seem to entangle the bather and her environ in an irrepressible interplay of exuberant geometries.

Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 and currently lives and works in New York and Connecticut. He has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the New Museum in New York, and his work is represented in numerous museum collections around the world.